Housing waste in remote Indigenous Australia

The regular garbage collection schedule appears to be an ever-present feature of modern urban life in most developed countries-a routine, unquestioned part of our collective waste management practices. This chapter examines how this temporal routine became normalised and embodied in our daily lives as a disciplinary aspect of biopolitical governmentality and the various temporal concerns that significantly influenced its key features. “House offal” as a material of rapid decay and rot in urban settings, exacerbated by other temporalities like temperature seasonality and population fluctuations and densities, presented a key rationale for regular collection. The schedule constituted a temporal grid of compliance adopted to synchronise the population’s waste management practices to confront the temporal irregularities of uncontrolled biopolitical processes. Yet, as the disciplinary practices of regular containerisation, moving to the curb, and collection became normalised, the established conveyor belt of waste simultaneously produced environmental injustices and wasted spaces. While some urban private and public spaces were rendered clean, other areas were never served or became disposal sites, especially communities of people of colour, immigrants and the poor. These inequalities raise unresolved ethical and moral questions. Are the temporalities of waste inherent in the schedule the right ones for our time?.